A white house displaying a protruding semicircular bulge on its facade, crowned by a round marquee supported by a center column that spans the entire volume of the house and descends to the ground floor, defining the front porch plan. Thus, the construction marks its curious presence in the city. An important exponent of the modernist movement in São Paulo, this UFO-house, inaugurated in 1938, is part of a development of 17 built-for-rent houses, designed and developed by Flávio de Carvalho on his family lot in the Jardins neighborhood, between Alameda Lorena and Alameda Ministro Rocha Azevedo, which previously belonged to the father of the poet Oswald de Andrade. Vila América - also known as Vila Modernista - has an internal street, which integrates all the properties in the complex, becoming, ideally, a kind of collective backyard for tenant-residents. A resident of the house located on the corner of the complex, Flávio maintained a store on the ground floor of the Villa, called “Vaca”, where he sold dairy products produced on his farm in Valinhos.
Radical and provocative, Flávio de Carvalho was a fierce critic of bourgeois habits and believed the city was the true home of the “man of tomorrow,” who he referred to as “the naked man.” Hence the Villa’s sense of community that challenges the individualism of private lots, designing semi-detached and/or row houses. Which, within the interior layout of the houses’ blueprints ends up leading to the suppression of hallways, a greater integration of social and service areas, the creation of modestly-sized rooms, the suggestion of curtains (instead of walls) to divide some rooms, making them flexible, and the drafting of careful instructions for the correct usage of the houses. Pedagogical regulation instructions aiming to educate the new man to come, less inclined to bourgeois standards of comfort and therefore more apt to become an active inhabitant of the city.
The plastered walls painted white, the reinforced concrete structures, and the expedient of employing thin metal profiles in window frames and guardrails are some of the features that date back to the idea of the house as a “machine for living”, as devised by Le Corbusier in the 1920s. In 1930s São Paulo, the modernist houses designed by Gregori Warchavchik and Flávio de Carvalho emerged as provocative aberrations. In other words, it was as if UFOs had landed amid the ornate two-story houses with eclectic features that dominated the landscapes in São Paulo’s elite neighborhoods. Misunderstood, Flávio’s development ended up being sold and disfigured, thus losing both its ability to educate the new man, as intended by the irreverent artist-architect, and its sense of community. Even so, in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s, this house (number 1052 on Alameda Ministro Rocha Azevedo) housed furniture design stores like Nucleon 8, and architecture and design offices such as Studio Arthur Casas.
It's commendable that nowadays private institutions such as art galleries are committed to restoring residential projects that are part of our modern architectural heritage, returning them to collective fruition. In the case of this project, one of the few reasonably preserved houses from the development is a structure whose central space has high ceilings, walls with rounded corners and a calculated alternance of opaque windowsills and open plans displaying thin horizontal iron bars, providing this empty center with a highly kinetic character. A feature which will certainly be explored to the fullest by artists in site specific works created here.
Unlike Warchavchik, who was closer to Bauhaus, Flávio de Carvalho was an experimental free spirit, much more identified with Dadaism. At the headquarters of Fazenda Capuava, which he designed and built for himself in Valinhos, the artist-architect combines a Modern lexicon with references to ancient cultures, like the Egyptians, conveying the avant-garde’s progressivism and an unorthodox erotic life drive. Here in Jardins, he tried to adapt to the rules of the market, in order to be able to subvert it. But the market resisted. Eighty years later, with its space open to artistic experimentation, one of these houses is now given unexpected new life. Let's hope there will be others!
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Guilherme Wisnik
